Hayward, Max, translator. On Trial: The Soviet State versus "Abram Tertz" and "Nikolai Arzhak." New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1966.
Intro:
made it to WEst by "undisclosed channels, but is of indubitable authenticity." (1)
on Sinyavsky: "It is true that, like most Russian intellectuals of his generation, he was deeply affected by Khrushchev's revelations at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 about the horrors of the Stalinist past, and reacted with all the inevitable outrage of one who had, albeit with some qualms of intellect and conscience, beleieved. This was a turning point for many younf Russians, who had hitherto tended to excuse the excesses of the Stalin era on the grounds of revolutionary expediency." 4
arrested on Sept. 13, 1965
"For the next two months, numberous anxious inquiries, both public and private, from leading Wester writers and organizations were addressed to Kosygin, Surkov (Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers) and others. They were met by silence. Only on November 22 did Surkov (Secretary of the Union of Soviet WRiters) and others. They wre met by silence. Only on Novemeber 22 did Surkov admit the arrests at a press conference in Paris, at the same time giving a solemn assurance that 'legality' would be observed. (22)
"Ivestia tried to run a follow-up campaign of 'massive indignation' in response to Eremin's article. but it could produce only three or four rather unconvincing expressions of outrage from an ill assorted collection of 'average citizens.' The classical orchestration was lacking." (25)
"There were several unusual features about it and in one respect it was unprecedented, namelt, that it was the first time in the history of the Soviet Union that writers had been put on trial for what they had written." (26)
"The second unusual feature was a striking difference in the way the case was reported in the fovernment newspaper Ivestia and the way it was reported in the party newspaper Pravda....The pieces are writeen in the classical style of the Russian satirical feuilleton, speak with heavy sarcasm of the accused, quote their words in order to mock them, and in general assume the guilt of the two men before the court reached its verdict. The defendants are presented as cowwardly felons who squirmed under the withering attack and the iron logic of the prosecution." (27)
More available about illegality of trial on 27
"The third unusual feature of the trial is that the accused did not plead guilty. This evidently took the prosecution by surprise and may partly explain the the very maladroit handling of of the trial, and the gingerly way in which it was reported by Pravda." (28)
"What is tragic about this trial is not only that the two men have been tried and sentenced for heresy, sacrilege and blasphemy, but that the trend toward and improvement in the administration of justice, the frequently expressed desire to do away with 'distortion of justic; as part of Stalin's legacy-- all this has recieved a sever setback. Sinyavsky and Daniel's trial could have been a test case to show that 'socialist legality' had really been established, that the earnest debate among Soviet jurists in recent years about the need to see that due legal procedures wer observed really counted for something." (32)
Article 70: "Agitation or propaganda carried out with the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet refime or in order to commit particularly dangerous crimes against the state, the dissemination for the said purposes of slanderous inventions defamatory to the Soviet political and social system as well as the dissemination or production or harboring for the said purposes of literature of similar content, are punishable by imprisonment for a period of from sic months to seven years and with exile from two to five tears, or without exile, or by exile from two to five years." (42)
"In the novel The Trial Begins, Sinyavsky, under the guise of criticism of the cult of personality, sneers at the Soviet system and the principles of MArxism-Leninism." (45)
Daniel: "Stalin had not been dead all that long. We all remembered well what were called 'violations of socialist legality.' And I saw again all the symptoms: there was again one man who knew everything again one man who knew everything, again one person was being exalted, again one person was dictating his will to agricultural experts, artists, diplomats and writers. WE saw again how one single name appeared on the pages of newspapers and on posters, how the most banal and crude statement of this person was being held up to us as a revelation, as the quinesence of wisdom." (61)
Daniel: "Even the statutes of the Writers oUnion don't require writers to write about only novle, intelligent people." (68)
Daniel: "I was asked all the time what I wrote my story This is Moscow Speaking. Every time I replied: Because I felt there was a real danger of a resurgence of the cult of personality. To this the answer was always: What is the relevance of the cult of personality, if the story was written in 1960-61? To this I say: It was precisely in these year that a number of events made one feel that the vult of personality was being revived. This was not denied; I was not told. 'You are lying, this is not true'--my words were simply ifnored as though I had never said them." (150)
Showing posts with label Max Hayward. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Max Hayward. Show all posts
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Hopkins, Vol. 5 "New Times"
85: Reboot w/ press conference
"In doing so, they were trying to demonstrate that the Chronicle was a legal enterprise, that htey themselves were doing no more than excersising the right of free press guaranteed in the Soviet constitution. But they also were inviting KGB retaliation, for they were challenging Andropov's authority, deliberaley it seemed."
prepared the back missing issues 28-30
"There was somehing new about the Chronicle. For the first time, contributors to the Chronicle publicly associated themselves with what Soviet authorities bluntly said was an illegal publication. Tatyana Khodorovich was a Russian-language linguist, a cultured woman with the just ends of the blossoming Soviet human rights movement. The other two public sponsors of the new Chronicle were equally dedicated. Tatyana Velikanova, a mathematics programmer, had long been connected with the Chronicle as a source of information. Sergei Kovalev, an internationally known biologist, was a friend of Andrei Sakharov and shared the physicist's concerns about the repressive nature of Soviet society. In a separate statement drafted in Khodorovich's hand, and given to correspondents that May 7 when the Chronicle reappeared, Kovalev, Khodorovich and Velikanova obligated themselves to distribute the Chronicle. Others before them had been tried and imprisoned for as much.
'We consider it our duty,' they said, 'to facilitate the wide distribution to the maximum possible extent. We are very convinced of the necessity of making available this very truthful information about infringements of the basic rights of man in the soviet Union to everyone who is interested. (H, 87)"
part of initative group
107: pushing libel charge
"The London involvement began with a translation by Max Hayward of no. 5 of the Chronicle, dated December 1968. It appeared in subsequent issues of Survey, the British journal dealing with Soviet and East European affairs. Its editor, Leo Labedz, was perhaps the first foreign expert in Soviet affairs to recognize the significance of the Chronicle, sufficient in any case to translate into English and reproduce an entire number outside of the Soviet Union. At this point, Peter Reddaway, a Soviet specialist and lecturer at the Chonicle and took on the task of translating subsequent issues into English, beginning with no. 7. These he had mimeographed and sent privately to other Sovietologists. At the optimum, about 100 English-language copies of the early Chronicle were produced. Asked to do a book, Reddaway collected the first 11 issues of the Chronicle-those of the Gorbanevskaya ere-to produce an annotated and analytical account of the fledgling Soviet democratic movement that appeared in 1972 as the volume Uncensored Russia.
As Reddaway worked on his book, the head of research for the London-based Amnesty International also took an interest in the Chronicle. Dr. Zbynek Zeman, a scholar of Czech extraction, recognized that the Chronicle published precisely the type of well-documented information about human rights violations with which Amnesty International dealt. Starting February 1971, then, with issue no. 16, Amnesty International translated each Chronicle issue into English. Districution eventaully reached a maximum of 3,000 copies.
As all this was going on in London, other versions of the Chronicle were born in New York. Valery Chalidze, the physicist who with fellow scientists Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov had formed the Human Rights Committee, had been allowed to travel to the United States for a lecture tour in December 1972. Once Chalidze was there, Soviet authorities promptly deprived him of his Soviet citizenship, thus banishing him from his native country. Within a few months after this, it was clear that the Chronicle under KGB pressure had ceased to publish. Chalidze was not directly involved in the Chronicle's production, but he was nonetheless intimately associated with Moscow's dissident community. One in the United States, and with the Chronicle, apparently suppressed, Chalidze was urged to fill the void. The stimulus came from Edward Kline, a wealthy New York businessman with a special dedication to Soviet human rights. With line's financial backing, Chalidze set up Khronika Presss in New York and in mid-1973, as part of Khronika Press, began publishing a was facsimile of the Soviet Chronicle. The New York version was called A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR. Printed in both English and Russian, six times a year, its content, style and format (save for being printed rather than typewritten) mimicked for the Soviet Chronicle. Originally, the editors were Peter Reddaway and Edward Kline. Subsequently, Pavel Litvinov replaced Reddaway who became the London correspondent, and Valery Chalidze became editor in chief.
The Kline-Chalidze drew on a variety of sources in and outside the Soviet Union and ably continued the work of the Soviet Chronicle during the latter's 18-month hiatus. Russian-language copies were smuggled into the Soviet Union, and the English-language veresion were distributed among Western journalists, government specialists, and scholars specializing in Soviet affairs.
While the original Chronicle reappeared in Moscow in May 1974, the question in New York obviously was, What now? The decision was to continue the Chronicle of Human Rights, as a backstop to the Soviet Chronicle and because it could get information in English about Soviet human rights events to influential readers far more rapidly that the Moscow Chronicle. At the same time, it was decided to reproduce the Moscow Chronicle itself in Russian as copies arrived in the United States. This amounted to a Chronicle printing press in exile. Ultimately as many as 1,200 copies per issue of the Russian-language Chronicle were produced in New York, most of them destined for the Soviet Union.
95: MunichChronicle
96-97: post '74 Chronicle, more caught up in national groups, Jews
"In doing so, they were trying to demonstrate that the Chronicle was a legal enterprise, that htey themselves were doing no more than excersising the right of free press guaranteed in the Soviet constitution. But they also were inviting KGB retaliation, for they were challenging Andropov's authority, deliberaley it seemed."
prepared the back missing issues 28-30
"There was somehing new about the Chronicle. For the first time, contributors to the Chronicle publicly associated themselves with what Soviet authorities bluntly said was an illegal publication. Tatyana Khodorovich was a Russian-language linguist, a cultured woman with the just ends of the blossoming Soviet human rights movement. The other two public sponsors of the new Chronicle were equally dedicated. Tatyana Velikanova, a mathematics programmer, had long been connected with the Chronicle as a source of information. Sergei Kovalev, an internationally known biologist, was a friend of Andrei Sakharov and shared the physicist's concerns about the repressive nature of Soviet society. In a separate statement drafted in Khodorovich's hand, and given to correspondents that May 7 when the Chronicle reappeared, Kovalev, Khodorovich and Velikanova obligated themselves to distribute the Chronicle. Others before them had been tried and imprisoned for as much.
'We consider it our duty,' they said, 'to facilitate the wide distribution to the maximum possible extent. We are very convinced of the necessity of making available this very truthful information about infringements of the basic rights of man in the soviet Union to everyone who is interested. (H, 87)"
part of initative group
107: pushing libel charge
"The London involvement began with a translation by Max Hayward of no. 5 of the Chronicle, dated December 1968. It appeared in subsequent issues of Survey, the British journal dealing with Soviet and East European affairs. Its editor, Leo Labedz, was perhaps the first foreign expert in Soviet affairs to recognize the significance of the Chronicle, sufficient in any case to translate into English and reproduce an entire number outside of the Soviet Union. At this point, Peter Reddaway, a Soviet specialist and lecturer at the Chonicle and took on the task of translating subsequent issues into English, beginning with no. 7. These he had mimeographed and sent privately to other Sovietologists. At the optimum, about 100 English-language copies of the early Chronicle were produced. Asked to do a book, Reddaway collected the first 11 issues of the Chronicle-those of the Gorbanevskaya ere-to produce an annotated and analytical account of the fledgling Soviet democratic movement that appeared in 1972 as the volume Uncensored Russia.
As Reddaway worked on his book, the head of research for the London-based Amnesty International also took an interest in the Chronicle. Dr. Zbynek Zeman, a scholar of Czech extraction, recognized that the Chronicle published precisely the type of well-documented information about human rights violations with which Amnesty International dealt. Starting February 1971, then, with issue no. 16, Amnesty International translated each Chronicle issue into English. Districution eventaully reached a maximum of 3,000 copies.
As all this was going on in London, other versions of the Chronicle were born in New York. Valery Chalidze, the physicist who with fellow scientists Andrei Sakharov and Andrei Tverdokhlebov had formed the Human Rights Committee, had been allowed to travel to the United States for a lecture tour in December 1972. Once Chalidze was there, Soviet authorities promptly deprived him of his Soviet citizenship, thus banishing him from his native country. Within a few months after this, it was clear that the Chronicle under KGB pressure had ceased to publish. Chalidze was not directly involved in the Chronicle's production, but he was nonetheless intimately associated with Moscow's dissident community. One in the United States, and with the Chronicle, apparently suppressed, Chalidze was urged to fill the void. The stimulus came from Edward Kline, a wealthy New York businessman with a special dedication to Soviet human rights. With line's financial backing, Chalidze set up Khronika Presss in New York and in mid-1973, as part of Khronika Press, began publishing a was facsimile of the Soviet Chronicle. The New York version was called A Chronicle of Human Rights in the USSR. Printed in both English and Russian, six times a year, its content, style and format (save for being printed rather than typewritten) mimicked for the Soviet Chronicle. Originally, the editors were Peter Reddaway and Edward Kline. Subsequently, Pavel Litvinov replaced Reddaway who became the London correspondent, and Valery Chalidze became editor in chief.
The Kline-Chalidze drew on a variety of sources in and outside the Soviet Union and ably continued the work of the Soviet Chronicle during the latter's 18-month hiatus. Russian-language copies were smuggled into the Soviet Union, and the English-language veresion were distributed among Western journalists, government specialists, and scholars specializing in Soviet affairs.
While the original Chronicle reappeared in Moscow in May 1974, the question in New York obviously was, What now? The decision was to continue the Chronicle of Human Rights, as a backstop to the Soviet Chronicle and because it could get information in English about Soviet human rights events to influential readers far more rapidly that the Moscow Chronicle. At the same time, it was decided to reproduce the Moscow Chronicle itself in Russian as copies arrived in the United States. This amounted to a Chronicle printing press in exile. Ultimately as many as 1,200 copies per issue of the Russian-language Chronicle were produced in New York, most of them destined for the Soviet Union.
95: MunichChronicle
96-97: post '74 Chronicle, more caught up in national groups, Jews
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